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The use of control charts by lay-people and hospital decision-makers for guiding decision making
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Schmidtke, Kelly, Watson, Derrick G. and Vlaev, Ivo (2016) The use of control charts by lay-people and hospital decision-makers for guiding decision making. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 70 (7). pp. 1114-1128. doi:10.1080/17470218.2016.1172096 ISSN 1747-0218.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2016.1172096
Abstract
Graphs presenting healthcare data are increasingly available to support lay-people and hospital staffs’ decision-making. When making these decisions, hospital staff should consider the role of chance, i.e., random variation. Given random variation, decision-makers must distinguish signals (sometimes called special-cause data) from noise (common-cause data). Unfortunately, many graphs do not facilitate the statistical reasoning necessary to make such distinctions. Control charts are a less commonly used type of graph that support statistical thinking by including reference lines that separate data more likely to be signals from those more likely to be noise. The current work demonstrates for whom (lay-people and hospital staff) and when (treatment and investigative decisions) control charts strengthen data driven decision-making. We present two experiments that compare people’s use of control and non-control charts to make decisions between hospitals (Funnel charts vs League tables) and to monitor changes across time (Run charts with control lines vs Run charts without control lines). As expected, participants more accurately identified the outlying data using a control chart than a non-control chart, but their ability to then apply that information to more complicated questions (e.g., where should I go for treatment?, and should I investigate?) was limited. The discussion highlights some common concerns about using control charts in hospital settings.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||||
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Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management R Medicine > R Medicine (General) R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School > Behavioural Science Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Psychology Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School |
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Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Medical care--Statistics, Medical care--Charts, diagrams, etc, Decision-making, Hospitals—Administration--Decision-making | ||||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology | ||||||||||
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis | ||||||||||
ISSN: | 1747-0218 | ||||||||||
Official Date: | 25 April 2016 | ||||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 70 | ||||||||||
Number: | 7 | ||||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 1114-1128 | ||||||||||
DOI: | 10.1080/17470218.2016.1172096 | ||||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 29 March 2016 | ||||||||||
Funder: | National Institute for Health Research (Great Britain) (NIHR), Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) |
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